The former has a long history of not cooperating with local authorities (also in ways I personally think are sometimes quite malicious but that is off topic). Und normal circumstances ICE would never have the power to lead to a shut down of air space, but with the current administration who knows.

And drug cartel investigations won't cooperate with the city council as an investigation big enough to shut down airspace wouldn't want to risk it leaking by speaking with a city council about it.

But this is a pretty big deal and lets hope this is just about preventing some high ranking drug cartel members from fleeing and not some retaliatory horror story implicitly triggered by the repeated public rejections and denouncements of Trump in recent week. Like if we look at full (and violent) dictatorships(1) you would expect an internet outage to follow and then a lot of people to die.

(1): To be clear no the US is not a full blown violent dictatorship. Even through things are bad, they are not "that" bad. Through IMHO there seem to be people in the government which want to make it exactly that bad.

- it's related to the annouced GPS disruption test (although that's a really long time and doesn't seem urgent enough)

- someone in Mexico is getting kidnapped by Gov

- nuclear tests

I wish those were crazy ideas, but here we are...

(it shows that some areas above the border in the desert are blocked off, which makes sense to fight drug smuggling by drones without risking mistaking drones with aircrafts)

but he article is about the new circular zone directly placed over El Paso with El Paso International Airport directly in it's center. (Interestingly because they used a circle it technically covers the Mexican side of the boarder including a part of the airport on their side, but practically FAA can't shut down Mexican airspace so it's misleading).

Also worth noting there is:

- Holloman Air Force Base

- White Sands Missile Range

- Fort Bliss

- Fort Bliss McGregor Range

direct besides the city

so a Military exercise, or deployment of Military (Trump has said he will bomb cartel hideouts in Mexico) can be added to the list of possibilities

When something was traveling fast, we can usually tell its trajectory across the map much more accurately than we can tell where along that trajectory it impacted the ground. See: MH370.

it it's "just" a training exercise or test they could have announced the closing weeks or month before it happening massively reducing the cost fallout from it

not that the current administration has in generally acted with care when it comes to causing huge financial damage to US cities, especially such they don't like

which kinda makes it normal to not have a explanation

because anything abnormal enough to cause something like that is also likely something kept secret until it's done

(Like large scale operations against drug cartel, "special military operation", or a large scale ICE operation which shouldn't be able to cause this but does because the current administration is uh, what it is.)

It's likely be something small enough and with little/no fuel because if it left a big smoking hole they'd find it quick. And it's gotta be something with fairly questionable aerodynamic properties (i.e. damaged) or questionable guidance (i.e not an inadvertently released bomb) otherwise they'd have a very good idea of where it landed.

If the cartels have MANPADS then our intel is already blown by issuing the TFR, so what's the harm in just saying it out loud?